Wow, first to find this thread at the top of the Google search results ("Octane Step import") and then to see that I already posted in it 7 years ago. :D

A lot of things have happened in those seven years, but apparently not for Octane. I'm no longer a student and where I work it feels as if ...

I logged on today to see if there were any responses from the Octane Render team to my latest post, and I was appalled to not only see that entire thread gone, but all of my posts on this forum completely erased!

I'm a student using Solidworks and all I ever posted about here were questions ...

Not to forget that Autodesk Alias products also use this file format for importing/exporting to other CAD packages...

I'm just a student using the free student versions of Solidworks and Alias Automotive, so I'm definetly NOT interested an expensive CAD version.

Especially not since the previously mentioned file formats STEP and IGES are free of licensing and also often the only way of transferring files between ...

2 months sounds really close, but I wonder, are all of the features from that feature poll going to be in the 1.0 final? That is, emitters, normals, alpha etc.

Also, I'd really like to try out the OS X version before I buy a license...

Well, a student version of Solidworks doesn't export to many filetypes, but even a full fledged SW version only exports:

Part, Lib Feat Part, Part Templates, Form Tool, Parasolid, Parasolid Binary, IGES, STEP, ACIS, VDAFS, VRML, STL, eDrawings, Adobe Portable Document Format, Universal 3D, 3D XML ...